Painting, Modelling and Gaming

Tag Archives: Army List

Are you tired of toiling away through your codex, breaking your lead pencil and scribbling out incorrect point calculations? Well ah ha…. there’s an app for that.

Lately me and my fellow Tykens Rift bloggers have been playing with Quartermaster and Battlescribe available on iOS.

Please Note: This review was done using iOS apps only. My experience of Android has left a nasty stain on my mattress. Cheap imitation operating systems are not a substitute for the real thing.

Anyway Apps, yes, so how does it work?

Templates

Firstly lets note that GW are not going to let any App be sold with their codex stats, costs and attributes built-in, so you’re going to have to put these in yourself. This really is quite easy to do but somewhat time-consuming. If you’re a Marine player I imagine you’re going to be inputting all day. But not to worry, there are plenty dark corners of the net that have templates for you.

As a responsible blogger I recommend that you only take the templates of codices you already have *looks at GW’s legal team while typing*.

The one thing that must be said about creating your list on Battlescribe is that it can only be done on the PC; shame I know. Quartermaster does win in this regard and works really well on the iPad.

Your Army’s

Once you’ve built your first army list you can save it and create many more. Over time you’ll have all sorts of balanced lists designed to defeat varying foes. The ease of which you can alter unit configurations also means you can tinker and improve your list after every game.

Adding Units

Adding units seems simple enough, each separated by unit type, HQ, Troop, Fast Attack etc. and even an additional section for Allies, so they’re keeping up with 6th Ed Rules.

What’s nice about Quartermaster is that they display costs for all total units below each unit type. So for example I can see that I’ve spent 372 pts on my HQ and that’s 36% of my army. If I think it looks noticeably unbalanced I can correct it. Something that doesn’t seem so obvious on paper.

Editing Units

The templates already allow you to set the rules for each unit. So when I choose my Fire Warriors, I already have a minimum number as specified in my codex and standard gear selected. Of course I can easily edit all this by adding a command to the unit or change weapons and adding grenades. I know right, excellent!

Even while adding weapons a little note at the bottom is telling me I can only take 3 items, which is great incase I forget. Not that it will deter the broken list players 😉

Each unit also comes with notes about special abilities so under some of my elites I can see Deep Strike or Infiltrate, also ‘Excellent’. That was said in my best Wayne’s World voice obviously.

Printing my List

Finally of course you can print out your finished list. The full print out comes with each models stats, weapons and unit costs, perfect. Although don’t expect the generated template to be pretty, its functional, it’s not going to win you the most well presented list prize at tournament.

Summary

So this isn’t all for free understandably; the full version for Quartermaster is £2.99. Alternatively you could try Battlescribe for free and then buy the full no advert version for £2.49.

Thoughts from Chris using Battlescribe: “Whilst it’s a great tool it does require you to use a PC to create the entire list, and from experience this takes a while. Whilst I’m fairly impressed, there are quite a few things to get your head round which may quickly put off anyone who is expecting something to work “out of the box” so to speak. After all the hard work and swearing it’s an immensely powerful little tool and very useful. It has already saved me hours with trying different list ideas, but still owes me a good few more back before the balance is restored.”

Neil: “I can’t (personally) recommend Quartermaster on a phone sized device because I find it too small but the iPad is great. Everything can be created, edited and saved in the app. No booting of PC required! 🙂 ”

Hopefully this has helped a few of you before splashing out on these apps.